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...the reason I participate in these meetings is not to solve any personal problem. One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution....

...This is part of one of the most important theories we are beginning to articulate. We call it “the pro-woman line.” What it says basically is that women are really neat people. The bad things that are said about us as women are either myths (women are stupid), tactics women use to struggle individually (women are bitches), or are actually things that we want to carry into the new society and want men to share too (women are sensitive, emotional). Women as oppressed people act out of necessity (act dumb in the presence of men), not out of choice. Women have developed great shuffling techniques for their own survival (look pretty and giggle to get or keep a job or man) which should be used when necessary until such time as the power of unity can take its place. Women are smart not to struggle alone (as are blacks and workers).

The protest of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City in September of 1968 told the nation that a new feminist movement is afoot in the land. ... Media coverage ranged from the front pages of several newspapers in the United States to many articles in the foreign press. The action brought many new members into our groups and many requests from women outside the city for literature and information. Many letters said, “I've been waiting so long for something like this.” ...

...But no action taken in the struggle for our liberation will be all good or all bad. It is necessary that we analyze each step to see what we did that was effective, what was not, and what was downright destructive....

...We all agreed that our main point in the demonstration would be that all women are hurt by beauty competition—Miss America as well as ourselves... We didn't say clearly enough that we women are FORCED to play the Miss America roll—not by beautiful women, but by men we have to act that way for and by a system that has so well institutionalized male supremacy for its own ends....

Unfortunately the best slogan for the action came up about a month after the contest when Ros Baxandall came out with... “Every day in a woman's life is a walking Miss America contest.”

The world is not the same as when the social wage programs were put into existence in Europe. Those concessions were the result of a confluence of a period of strong capitalist growth and the pressure put on capitalist governments by the victories of socialist revolutions plus a growing and militant pro-socialist tendency of their own labor forces... Socialism can't be built on the example of the social welfare state when the social welfare state was (successfully) put in place to STOP the advance toward socialism.

It's a little like when we got the abortion reform of Roe V. Wade but not the right for women to control our own reproduction that we were fighting for. The Roe V. Wade reform, based on privacy instead of women's rights, effectively stopped the movement for repeal dead in its tracks, and we've been on the defensive ever since.

Consciousness-raising was birthed as a mass-organizing tool for the liberation of women in 1968 when the country and the world were seething with freedom movements. The women who started the Women’s Liberation Movement, several of whom had experienced the Southern Civil Rights Movement firsthand, were convinced it would take a similar mass movement that went beyond lobbying for legal reforms (as NOW and some other groups were doing) to get to the roots of male supremacy and end women’s oppression.

Feminism has always been a problematic term in the struggle for women's liberation, and now with such unlikely public figures as Sarah Palin and Lady Gaga embracing it, it's become more so. ...

In the 1960s, many of us involved in getting the Women's Liberation Movement off the ground didn't at first want to call ourselves feminists because the term was applied to establishment liberal groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW). These groups concentrated on legal and lobbying solutions, mostly in the areas of employment and careers, and while we appreciated their work, we had a much broader goal for our movement: the total liberation of all women in every area of our lives, including those considered too "personal" for public discussion and action. Also in contrast to the liberal groups, most of us agreed that women's liberation could not be achieved under capitalism ...

This chapter explores some of the
theoretical and ideological struggles over leadership in the Women’s Liberation
Movement during its heyday—including my own experience, sometimes as follower,
sometimes as leader. It will show that when the growth of the movement called
forth a need for more structured organizations with accountable leaders, it was
met with a resistance that contributed greatly to radical feminism’s inability
to unite, fight and survive.

...

From its inception, [we]
operated with no formal structure...Leadership at this point was a
matter of having enough vision to point the way and enough verbal agility and
persistence to convince others to take the same path. ...

We came to the frustrating realization that we have been left without even a language for expressing our demands. The language of “choice” doesn't do it—not alone anyway. ...

The only people who really are merely "pro-choice" are those who oppose abortion but who put the personal right of choice above their own position. Others are reluctant to stand against the tide, stopping at “choice” when they are really “pro-abortion” ...

We have come to the tentative conclusion that the only way through this quagmire is to fight for a positive federal law—or maybe even Constitutional Amendment, considering how easily laws can be repealed—guaranteeing women the right to total reproductive control ...

The
most pressing need of the moment for women's liberation is building a national
organization that can both rekindle a mass women's liberation movement and
guide that movement in the steps needed to defeat male supremacy. ...

...One
of the biggest lacks we have come to perceive in the women's liberation
movement of the late sixties and early seventies was an inadequate understanding
of the need for central organization and for long-range planning. The movement
was all do-your-own-thingism and little unified activity, all
"democracy" and no centralism. Its great advances in analysis and
insight were unaccompanied by a well thought out, long-range program of action...

Rape is sexual harassment escalated to the level of physical violence. “The war of the sexes”—as it used to be so cutely called—is about power. ... —the unequal power relationship between men and women—and it is there that we must make a change.

Today [1973] the women's liberation movement is in the hands of a group of liberal opportunists…. These women—Ms. Magazine, some of the Village Voice writers, and the “women's lib ladies” in communities all over the country—are scrambling frantically after the few crumbs that men have thrown out when we radicals began to expose the truth and demand some changes. These are the women who have access to the press and money. They are supposedly "the leaders" of the women's movement, but they are leading us down the road to a few respectable reforms and nothing more.